İpek Türeli, Istanbul, Open City: Exhibiting Anxieties of Urban Modernity. London and New York: Routledge, 2018, xiii + 169 pages

Abstract

İpek Türeli’s Istanbul, Open City is a well-timed addition to the recent body of work produced on urban space and life in Turkey. Placing visual cultural analysis in dialogue with urban history and breaking with conventional modes of periodization, the book provides a fresh look at Istanbul, a city which understandably looms large within the field of urban studies. It approaches head-on the ways in which the dramatic changes in Istanbul’s physical and social space since the 1950s have been represented visually in various media such as photography, cinema films, public exhibitions, panorama museums, and theme parks, so as to “peel back the layers of cultural anxiety that shape the way the city is experienced today” (p. 5). As such, the book, which is based on a doctoral dissertation completed at the University of California Berkeley’s Department of Architecture, not only enriches our understanding of Istanbul’s recent history, but also provides insights into the conceptualization of the intricate relations between past and present through examining anxieties inherent in the experience of urban modernity. The book suggests that Istanbul’s imaginative geographies have been forged through “a pervasive feeling of loss” which in turn enhances a nostalgic gesture, particularly among the urban middle classes. In the face of the influx of ruralto-urban migrants in the post-war era and the swift urban development that has expanded the city’s physical boundaries in an unprecedented way, middleclass urbanites have articulated and mediated their anxieties concerning class relations, cultural practices, and identities through the trope of nostalgia that insistently refers to a vanished sense of totality and certainty. In this regard, nostalgia serves as the primary affect that permeates the visual cultural production on Istanbul, as “the future of the city is increasingly imagined based on improvisations of its past” (p. 4). Such interplay between past and present is not peculiar to a specific period, social group, or political actor, but has become an immanent dimension of discursive practices through which the city is seen and signified. Underlying this overall argument is a particular approach that takes into consideration the “productivity” of visual representations. Conceptualizing them as constitutive of reality, rather than merely reflective of it, the book perceptively illustrates the ways in which visual representations shape predominant perspectives on the built environment and thus form urban imaginaries through which individuals collectively experience the city. Along these lines, the book unpacks how the socially shocking and politically explosive ambiguities born out of rapid modernization, changing 205